They drove into Quito in a windy, cold twilight. The hotel looked a hundred years old. The room had a high ceiling with black beams and white piaster walls. They sat on the beds, shivering. Lee was a little junk sick.
They walked around the main square. Lee hit a drugstore—no paregoric without a script. A cold wind from the high mountains blew rubbish through the dirty streets. The people walked by in gloomy silence. Many had blankets wrapped around their faces. A row of hideous old hags, huddled in dirty blankets that looked like old burlap sacks, were ranged along the walls of a church.
"Now, son, I want you to know I am different from other citizens you might run into. Some people will give you the women-are-no-good routine. I'm not like that. You just pick yourself one of these señoritas and take her right hack to the hotel with you."
Allerton looked at him. "I think I will get laid tonight," he said.
"Sure," Lee said. "Go right ahead. They don't have much pulchritude in this dump, but that hadn't oughta deter you young fellers. Was it Frank Harris said he never saw an ugly woman till he was thirty? It was, as a matter of fact. . . . Let's go back to the hotel and have a drink."
The bar was drafty. Oak chairs with black leather seats. They ordered martinis. At the next table a red-faced American in an expensive brown gabardine suit was talking about some deal involving twenty thousand acres. Across from Lee was an Ecuadoran man, with a long nose and a spot of red on each cheekbone, dressed in a black suit of European cut. He was drinking coffee and eating sweet cakes.
Lee drank several cocktails. He was getting sicker by the minute. "Why don't you smoke some weed?" Allerton suggested. 'That might help."
"Good idea. Let's go up to the room."
Lee smoked a stick of tea on the balcony. "My god, is it cold out on that balcony," he said, coming back into the room.
"'. . . And when twilight falls on the beautiful old colonial city of Quito and those cool breezes steal down from the Andes, walk out in the fresh of the evening and look over the beautiful señoritas who seat themselves, in colorful native costume, along the wall of the sixteenth-century church that overlooks the main square. . . .' They fired the guy wrote that. There are limits, even in a travel folder. . . .
"Tibet must be about like this. High and cold and full of ugly-looking people and llamas and yaks.
Yak milk for breakfast, yak curds for lunch, and for dinner a yak boiled in his own butter, and a fitting punishment for a yak, too, if you ask me.
"You can smell one of those holy men ten miles downwind on a clear day. Sitting there pulling on his old prayer wheel so nasty. Wrapped in dirty old burlap sacks, with bedbugs crawling around where his neck sticks out of the sack. His nose is all rotted away and he spits betel nut out through the nose holes like a spitting cobra. . . . Give me that Wisdom-of-the-East routine.
"So we got like a holy man and some bitch reporter comes to interview him. He sits there chewing on his betel nut. After a while, he says to one of his acolytes, 'Go down to the Sacred Well and bring me a dipper of paregoric. I'm going to make with the Wisdom of the East. And shake the lead out of your loin cloth!' So he drinks the P.G. and goes into a light trance, and makes cosmic contact—we call it going on the nod in the trade. The reporter says, 'Will there be war with Russia, Mahatma? Will Communism destroy the civilized world? Is the soul immortal? Does God exist?'
"The Mahatma opens his eyes and compresses his lips and spits two long, red streams of betel nut juice out through his nose holes. It runs down over his mouth and he licks it back in with a long, coated tongue and says, 'How in the fuck should I know?' The acolyte says, 'You heard the man. Now cut. The Swami wants to be alone with his medications.' Come to think of it, that is the wisdom of the East. The Westerner thinks there is some secret he can discover. The East says,
'How the fuck should I know?'"
That night Lee dreamed he was in a penal colony. All around were high, bare mountains. He lived in a boardinghouse that was never warm. He went out for a walk. As he stepped off a streetcomer onto a dirty cobblestone street, the cold mountain wind hit him. He tightened the belt of his leather jacket and felt the chill of final despair.
Lee woke up and called to Allerton, "Are you awake, Gene?"
"Yes."
"Cold?"
"Yes."
"Can I come over with you?"
"Ahh, well all right."
Lee got in bed with Allerton. He was shaking with cold and junk sickness.
"You're twitching all over," said Allerton. Lee pressed against him, convulsed by the adolescent lust of junk sickness.
"Christ almighty, your hands are cold."
When Allerton was asleep, he rolled over and threw his knee across Lee's body. Lee lay still so he wouldn't wake up and move away.
The next day Lee was really sick. They wandered around Quito. The more Lee saw of Quito, the more the place brought him down. The town was hilly, the streets narrow. Allerton stepped off the high curb and a car grazed him. "Thank god you're not hurt,"
Lee said. "I sure would hate to be stuck in this town."
They sat down in a little coffeehouse where some German refugees hung out, talking about visas and extensions and work permits, and got into a conversation with a man at the next table. The man was thin and blond, his head caved in at the temples. Lee could see the blue veins pulsing in the cold, high-mountain sunlight that covered the man's weak, ravaged face and spilled over the scarred oak table onto the worn wooden floor. Lee asked the man if he liked Quito.
"To be or not to be, that is the question. I have to like it."
They walked out of the coffeehouse, and up the street to a park. The trees were stunted by wind and cold. A few boys were rowing around and around in a small pond. Lee watched them, torn by lust and curiosity. He saw himself desperately rummaging through bodies and rooms and closets in a frenzied search, a recurrent nightmare. At the end of the search was an empty room. He shivered in the cold wind.
Allerton said, "Why don't you ask in the coffee shop for the name of a doctor?"
"That's a good idea."
The doctor lived in a yellow stucco villa on a quiet side street. He was Jewish, with a smooth, red face, and spoke good English. Lee put down a dysentery routine. The doctor asked a few questions. He started to write out a prescription. Lee said, "The prescription that works best is paregoric with bismuth."
The doctor laughed. He gave Lee a long look. Finally he said, "Tell the truth now." He raised a forefinger, smiling. "Are you addicted to opiates? Better you tell me. Otherwise I cannot help you."
Lee said, "Yes."
"Ah ha," said the doctor, and he crumpled up the prescription he was writing and dropped it in the wastebasket. He asked Lee how long the addiction had lasted. He shook his head, looking at Lee.
"Ach," he said, "you are a young person. You must stop this habit. So you lose your life. Better you should suffer now than continue this habit." The doctor gave Lee a long, human look.
"My god," Lee thought, "what you have to put up with in this business." He nodded and said, "Of course, Doctor, and I want to stop. But I have to get some sleep. I am going to the coast tomorrow, to Manta."
The doctor sat back in his chair, smiling. "You must stop this habit." He ran through the routine again. Lee nodded abstractedly. Finally the doctor reached for his prescription pad: three c.c.'s of tincture.
The drugstore gave Lee paregoric instead of tincture. Three c.c.'s of P.G. Less than a teaspoonful. Nothing. Lee bought a bottle of antihistamine tablets and took a handful. They seemed to help a little.